Swallowing the Sun

by David Park

  Maybe if they’d got there quicker they could have saved her. Did they even understand what was wrong with her? Maybe she was just another young girl who had drunk too much, the type they must see every night of the week. Did she say anything? He wants to ask but it’s too late now as Rob climbs into the ambulance and the doors are banged shut. As it drives off he thinks he sees a face pressed to the darkened window but isn’t sure if it’s his mother’s or Rob’s, or just the way the light slants and skirmishes against the glass.

  *

  He’s never been in an ambulance before, so he waves to Marty to let him know that he’s with Ma and everything’s all right now because he’s there to look after her. As they drive away he thinks his brother has started to look old and as if he doesn’t know all the things he thought he did. It’s to do with Rachel and he’s sorry about that but maybe it’s good for him to realise that he doesn’t know everything.

  ‘All right, Ma?’ he asks. ‘Rob’s here with you now. Rob’s here to look after you.’ He watches her eyes but they don’t look at him and his words, finding no one to receive them, filter back to him in the silence. None of them ever listened to him – he has a whole storehouse full of his unheard words. Sometimes at night in the spaces before sleep or when he walks on his own, high in the fields above the estate, they sift out from where they’re stored and drift about his head like thistledown blown on the frittery worry of the wind.

  ‘All right, Ma?’ he asks and touches the sleeve of her coat. ‘I’m here to see you’re looked after proper.’

  Marty, big man Marty, who always thought he knew best, didn’t even know how to look after his own mother. Anyone could see that she was going to hurt herself. Anyone with half a brain could see that it would end in a mess. Hadn’t he warned Marty only five minutes before it happened? It should never have come to this and if Marty’s supposed to be looking after things then he’s making a right mess of it. But that was always the trouble with Marty. Always the bloody expert even when he knew frig all and what he doesn’t realise, is that he’s not the Rob he once was. He’s not some snivelly kid, frightened of every shadow that flits across his face. He can work things out in his head for himself, doesn’t have to be told everything like he’s some kind of idiot. Didn’t he see what was going to happen to Ma? Didn’t he tell Marty before it happened? No one can say he didn’t. And Marty doesn’t like that, doesn’t like someone else knowing more things than him.

  Like the smicks. ‘You couldn’t catch a cold,’ he’d said. But up in Orangefield where the thin little river flowed under the bridge and round the boundary of the park, he’d proved his brother wrong. In his bare feet, the green streamers of slime and silt pushing up between his toes, he’s shown him what he could catch. Sticklebacks, dark darts of smicks, as quick as the blink of his eye, quivering into the shadowed edges of stones beyond the stretch of his arm. Like they knew you were coming, like they read your thoughts before you thought them. And then getting so close that one brushed the tips of his fingers.

  Her eyes are slow, moving round the ambulance as if she’s not sure where she is, as if she’s looking to make herself remember. ‘All right, Ma? Not long now,’ he says but she looks at him only for a second before her eyes start their slow trawl again. Couldn’t catch a cold. So what did mighty Marty know about fishing? He wanted him to be there to see it, knew he wouldn’t believe him unless he was able to see it for himself. He finds two empty paint tins and it doesn’t matter that his clothes are splashed, or his feet are cold as he scoops the smicks up in one tin, then transfers them to the other. Now it’s as if they’re begging him to catch them and sometimes he catches two at a time and the sun is warm on the back of his neck even though his clothes are wet and his feet beg to be taken out of the water.

  ‘We’ll soon be there, Ma,’ he says. She was the first to see them when he arrived back in the yard, the metal wire of the full cans cutting red weals into his palms. ‘What are you going to do with them?’ she’d asked and then he didn’t know what to say except ‘Show them to Marty.’ But she’d given him a plastic bucket and he’d poured the catch in, then sat and watched them swimming. Sat there until Marty came home and saw them. Saw every last one of them swimming in the yellow bucket.

  ‘All right, Ma?’

  She looks at him for the first time.

  ‘I haven’t given you anything for your birthday, Martin,’ she says and her hands start to pluck at her bag.

  *

  It’s clear his visit has been expected. Andrea’s father stands in the doorway of his expensive house, making himself big, inflating his existing obesity with an additional puff of stiff determination. He blocks any view of the house inside and his hands rest on both sides of the door frame, a barrier to potential entry.

  ‘Andrea’s not here,’ he says without any introductions. ‘She’s staying with her aunt at the moment.’

  ‘Can you give me the address, Mr Finlay?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I can’t do that. Listen, I know how you must be feeling but it’s not a good idea to talk to Andrea right now. She’s already spoken to the police and she’ll say everything she has to say at the inquest. Now it’s best if you leave it at that for the moment.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says, as if to go, then turns back and with his left arm pushes Finlay back against his door, brushes past him and up the hall. The door hammers against the wall, vibrating in piercing tandem with Finlay’s shouts.

  ‘Here, you can’t barge in here like this! Leave right now or I’ll call the police!’ His wife comes out of the kitchen, a phone in her hand. ‘Will I call them, Terry?’ Her finger is poised over the numbers, stiff and frozen, in the air, like an icicle waiting to melt. She is as small and thin as he is large. She wears a light-blue tracksuit and there is a lattice of gold at her throat and dangling from her wrist.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he tells them. ‘Go ahead and I’ll tell them that Andrea was the one who gave the girls the drugs. That she’s the one who handed them out.’ He watches them look at each other, sees the hesitation in their eyes. ‘So go ahead if you want.’

  ‘What do you want with Andrea?’ Finlay asks.

  ‘Andrea’s never taken drugs before. She swore to us this was her first time,’ his wife insists. ‘And we’re really, really sorry about what happened to Rachel.’

  ‘It could have been any one of them,’ Finlay says.

  ‘But it wasn’t, was it? It was Rachel. It was my daughter.’

  ‘What do you want with Andrea?’ Finlay asks again.

  ‘I need to talk to her, ask her about where the drugs came from.’

  ‘I know you’ve had a terrible loss – we feel for you, we really do and you’ve every right to be angry,’ Mrs Finlay says, ‘but will it make any difference to anything where they got the drugs, when according to Andrea there’s people dealing them on just about every street corner?’

  ‘Yes, it’ll make a difference to me,’ he answers, looking round the room for any trace of Andrea but there’s only the sweep of leather and wooden floors and colours that are supposed to be cool and easy to the eye. ‘And you’re right, I am angry, so tell me now if she’s here or not.’

  ‘You need to go,’ Finlay says, trying to impose himself again on the situation.

  He looks at him, tries to subdue a growing desire to punch him in the sagging folds of his stomach, to cut off his supply of air, to silence the stupid words that come out of his mouth. To choke her with the gold hanging from her neck because he thinks it is their money that helped kill his daughter.

  ‘I’ll go as soon as I’ve spoken to her. It’ll only take a few minutes.’

  ‘But she’s not here,’ her mother insists. ‘He was telling you the truth – she’s staying with her aunt for the present.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he asks. ‘Then I’d better go.’ He can feel their relief at his words as he walks back down the hall but when he reaches the front door he suddenly turns and makes for the stairs.

&nb
sp; ‘You can’t go up there!’ Finlay shouts. ‘Jean, call the police! Tell them we’ve an intruder.’

  He climbs the stairs, two at a time, his anger leaving him indifferent to the beep of phone numbers being pressed, pushes open the doors of rooms until he reaches one which is obviously her room. She’s not there. He has to peer into it – the curtains are closed. The walls are dark purple and covered with posters – the type that Rachel has, but the room is different, too. There’s no desk or books, nothing that makes the room anything more than somewhere to sleep and it’s a mess, with clothes strewn everywhere, including the floor, as if simply dropped at the point where they were discarded. It makes him pleased for a second when he compares it to Rachel’s room, knows that for all their money they’re nothing, nothing at all. And then he’s gone, turning only once to look back at the house before he spits on the pavement, trying to expel what lingers like a bad taste in his throat.

  The next day Roberts calls to see him at home. Alison thinks he’s come with news about the case but when she calls to the living room to announce his arrival, there is no excitement or expectancy in her voice. It’s started to annoy him that she seems to have no interest in finding out who supplied the stuff, or anything to do with what happened. She doesn’t even stay as Roberts picks the room’s most comfortable seat but instead makes the excuse of getting tea to take herself off to the kitchen.

  ‘So you’ve some news for us?’ he asks, not bothering to hide the cynicism in his voice.

  ‘You know why I’m here, Martin.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Finlay squealing down the phone then?’

  ‘That’s right. Not making a formal complaint or anything, very understanding of what you’re going through but concerned that you don’t upset Andrea, or try to contact her.’

  ‘Upset her? Do you not think it’s a bit late for upset?’

  ‘Like all the girls, apparently she’s been very fragile since …’ He pauses and skims his gaze round the room, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘She gave the drugs to the girls, she was the one who passed them on,’ he says as if he’s playing his trump card and locks his stare on Roberts’ face.

  ‘You don’t know that, Martin.’ His face reveals no surprise or shimmer of shock.

  ‘I know it because it’s true.’

  ‘It may be true but none of the girls are going to come out and say that. Right now they all want an equal share of the blame. Maybe they need it to feel better.’

  ‘I don’t care about them feeling better. What they feel is of no interest to me. And if you really want to know, I think you seem to be more concerned about the girls and their families than you do about this one.’

  ‘That’s not true – you know it isn’t true.’

  ‘From where I’m sitting it looks true to me.’

  ‘From where you’re sitting right now, Martin, nothing much in the world must look fair or right. I understand that.’

  ‘How can you understand that?’ he asks, desperate to throw off whatever lifeline of sympathy is going to be thrown to him because right now he feels as if he’s drowning and he doesn’t want either the illusion or reality of escape. ‘How can you understand that, when you haven’t lost a daughter to the scum who deal this shit?’

  ‘No, you’re right, I haven’t lost a daughter but I have lost people who were close to me, people I cared about. For what it’s worth, I’ve lost a guy I went through training with – best man at my wedding. He’d just come off duty, was collecting his daughter’s birthday bicycle. They shot him three times in the head. We got the guy who did it – a cold vicious bastard who killed a lot of people – managed to pin it on him in court.’ He pauses, looks at his feet for a second then looks him in the eye. ‘They let him out of the Maze a year ago with all the others. I see him from time to time – he always makes sure to smile and wave, asks me how I’m doing. You know how that feels, Martin?’

  He doesn’t answer, just nods his head.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else. They say he’s going to put a suit on soon, become a politician, make decisions about how the country should be run.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he asks.

  ‘What am I going to do about it?’ Roberts asks. ‘There’s sod all I can do about it, Martin, except do what everyone else with any sense is doing – take their package and get out.’

  ‘So maybe you’re retired already. Maybe this doesn’t matter to you any more,’ he says. He is full to the neck with other people’s consoling stories of suffering. He is full to the gills with their insistence that they understand. ‘You couldn’t pin Omagh on anyone – twenty-nine people and two unborn babies – so what’s one seventeen-year-old girl?’

  ‘I’m not retired until the day I leave. And until that day comes I’ll be doing everything to bring this case to a close. Believe me in that.’

  Roberts is standing up when she enters with the tea. She can see that he’s angry, knows that it must be caused by something Martin has said. She holds out the cup for him to take and he hesitates for a second as if he’s thinking of going, before he takes it and resumes his seat.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asks her. His voice is flat but contains no trace of anger.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, offering him a plate of biscuits. He takes his time before making his choice.

  ‘That’s good,’ he says, balancing the biscuit on the saucer. Silence settles for a few moments. ‘So how’re you doing?’ he asks her again.

  ‘Fine,’ she repeats. The cup looks small in his large hands. She worries that the biscuit might be soft, can’t remember how long they’ve had them. The fridge and cupboards are half-empty – she’ll have to do a proper shop soon, try to get back into some rhythm. They can’t go on like this, living from day to day, hand to mouth, running out to the shop at the last minute for things they need. There isn’t any fresh fruit in the house, the toothpaste has been squeezed completely flat. She thinks of Rachel’s yoghurts in the fridge. Maybe it’s time to try once more to re-enter the round of their lives and just maybe if she can clutch those old rhythms, their mechanical routines and rituals will help deaden what she feels. And she’s going to stop the drugs soon because she doesn’t think they help any more, only make her feel the same things in different ways.

  ‘So you’re back at work then?’ Roberts asks.

  ‘Yes, I’ve gone back.’

  ‘So how’s it going?

  ‘Fine,’ she says, offering him another biscuit.

  ‘Have to watch the waistline,’ he says, ‘before it gets too late. Someone told me that in Turkey they say a man without a stomach is like a house without a porch.’

  ‘Where’s Joan?’ she asks. There is a little sprinkle of crumbs on his lapel.

  ‘Joan’s in Tenerife. On holiday,’ Martin answers. ‘I told you that.’

  ‘She’ll be back next week,’ Roberts says, placing his cup and saucer on the hearth.

  ‘That’s good,’ she says. She remembers Joan’s hair and perfect make-up, the shine of her nails and her polished shoes. She wonders what it feels like to have the heat of the sun on your skin, to have your body brushed with oil, to swim in a warm sea. She lets her hand trace the line of her own hair. She thinks she’ll get it cut soon. Better to keep it as short as possible, easier to keep clean. Her fingers start to comb it but she stops as she imagines someone else touching it and feeling nothing but the thick tangle of grease and food. She pulls her hand away as if it’s been burnt.

  ‘I’d better be going now,’ Roberts says, standing up. Martin stays seated and doesn’t look at him or say anything.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, standing up too. ‘Fine,’ she says again, trying to remember how to smile. As Roberts moves to the door she watches the thin spray of crumbs fall silently to the floor. She wonders again if the biscuit was soft. Outside he pauses at the gate to say something to her but she doesn’t register the words and in her head starts to make a list of what it is she n
eeds to buy but when she tries to repeat it to herself, can’t remember the items with which she started.

  *

  He’s watched the house for three nights in a row. There’s no sign of her. Then he goes round on his afternoon off work and just when he’s started to think the Finlays were telling the truth about her going to stay somewhere else, he sees her come out of the driveway and head off down the tree-lined avenue. He follows her in the car at a safe distance. She looks older, heavier than he imagined. She’s dressed in a hooded top and jeans and once, as she walks, she pauses to put a mobile phone to her ear. He drives by, then pulls the car to the kerb and gets out.

  ‘Hello Andrea,’ he says, ‘it’s time to talk.’ He sees the panic in her eyes, the frantic internal debate about whether she should turn and run. ‘There’s no point running away like a child – I’ll only come after you. Get in the car and we’ll talk.’

  She stands perfectly still, her body stiff and rigid, the mobile phone held out from her body at waist height, as if it’s a gun she’s been ordered to drop. ‘I’ve been told I’m not to talk to you,’ she says, her voice trying to hide its uncertainty.

  ‘And you always do what you’ve been told?’ he asks. ‘Get in the car – I’m not goin’ to hurt you. I just want to talk.’ She doesn’t move; still weighing up her options, her eyes starting to skitter about in search of possible escape routes. He doesn’t move either because he knows that a sudden movement will panic her into flight. ‘I just want to talk,’ he repeats. ‘We can just sit here in the car – we don’t have to go anywhere.’

  She looks at the mobile phone, then puts it in her pocket. Her top lip bites the bottom one. She still isn’t sure. If he moved quickly he could grab her by the hood of her top and drag her but he tries talking to her again.

  ‘I’m not goin’ to hurt you. I just need to talk, that’s all,’ he says, trying to keep his voice neutral, drained of any trace of threat.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry about Rachel!’ she says, bursting into a high-pitched, staccato sob. ‘Really, really sorry. We didn’t think anything like this would ever happen. We never, never meant for anyone to get hurt.’